The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Computer Science,
#2151
Artemisia Gentileschi
1596 - 1654 (58 years)
Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter. Gentileschi is considered among the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio. She was producing professional work by the age of 15. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists, Gentileschi was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and she had an international clientele.
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Eva Hesse
1936 - 1970 (34 years)
Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s.
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Lee Krasner
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and visual artist active primarily in New York. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federa...
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Suzanne Valadon
1865 - 1938 (73 years)
Suzanne Valadon was a French painter who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.
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Julia Kastner
#2156
Bev Littlewood
#2157
Vanessa Bell
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf . Early life and education Vanessa Stephen was the elder daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth. The family included her sister Virginia, brothers Thoby and Adrian , half-sister Laura whose mother was Harriett Thackeray and half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth; they lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London. She was educated at home in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896.
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Sonia Delaunay
1885 - 1979 (94 years)
Sonia Delaunay was a French artist, who spent most of her working life in Paris. She was born in the Russian Empire, in the area which is now Ukraine, and formally trained in Russian Empire and Germany before moving to France and expanding her practice to include textile, fashion, and set design. She co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others. She was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964, and in 1975 was named an officer of the French Legion of Hon...
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Berthe Morisot
1841 - 1895 (54 years)
Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. In 1864, Morisot exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Sponsored by the government and judged by Academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the in Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the "rejected" Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, which included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.
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Edith Head
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Edith Head was an American costume designer who won a record eight Academy Awards for Best Costume Design between 1949 and 1973, making her the most awarded woman in the Academy's history. Head is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential costume designers in film history.
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Betty Parsons
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Betty Parsons was an American artist, art dealer, and collector known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism. She is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic figures of the American avant-garde.
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Amy Marie Charles
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Amy Marie Charles was professor of English literature at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a scholar of the seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert. Charles wrote a biography of the Herbert .
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Natalia Goncharova
1881 - 1962 (81 years)
Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer. Goncharova's lifelong partner was fellow Russian avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov. She was a founding member of both the Jack of Diamonds , Moscow's first radical independent exhibiting group, the more radical Donkey's Tail , and with Larionov invented Rayonism . She was also a member of the German-based art movement Der Blaue Reiter. Born in Russia, she moved to Paris in 1921 and lived there until her death.
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Adelaide Alsop Robineau
1865 - 1929 (64 years)
Adelaide Alsop Robineau was an American china painter and potter, and is considered one of the top ceramists of American art pottery in her era. Early life and education Adelaide Alsop was born in 1865 in Middletown, Connecticut. She developed an early interest in both drawing and the then–popular pursuit of china painting. As a young woman, she helped to support her family by teaching drawing at the boarding school where she had formerly been a student. During one summer break, she enrolled in the painter William Merritt Chase's summer school, her only experience of advanced training in painting and drawing.
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Rosalba Carriera
1675 - 1757 (82 years)
Rosalba Carriera was a Venetian Rococo painter. In her younger years, she specialized in portrait miniatures. Carriera would later become known for her pastel portraits, helping popularize the medium in eighteenth-century Europe. She is remembered as one of the most successful women artists of any era.
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Eleanor Layfield Davis
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Eleanor Layfield Davis , also called ELDA, was an American painter. She served on the Board of Trustees for Meredith College and both Meredith and Wake Forest University award art scholarships in her memory.
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Elaine de Kooning
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
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Ana Mendieta
1948 - 1985 (37 years)
Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter, and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. She is considered one of the most influential Cuban-American artists of the post-World War II era. Born in Havana, Mendieta left for the United States in 1961.
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Hertha Ayrton
1854 - 1923 (69 years)
Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor, and suffragette. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripple marks in sand and water.
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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an American artist of African-American and Native American ancestry, known for her sculpture. She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s. She became noted for her work in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture. Prophet died in 1960 at the age of 70.
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Theresa Pollak
1899 - 2002 (103 years)
Theresa Pollak was an American artist and art educator born in Richmond, Virginia. She was a nationally known painter, and she is largely credited with the founding of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a teacher at VCU's School of the Arts between 1928 and 1969. Her art has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 103 on September 18, 2002 and was given a memorial exhibition at Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University.
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Shirley Carew Titus
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Shirley Carew Titus was a nurse educator at the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. Titus was the executive director of the California Nurses' Association from 1942 until 1956. She successfully advocated for and achieved the first collective bargaining for nurses. In 1982, Titus was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame. She died on March 21, 1967. She was survived by her sister, Adele B. Titus.
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Sibyl M. Rock
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Sibyl Martha Rock was an American inventor who was a pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing. Rock was a key person in Consolidated Engineering Corporation's mass spectrometry team at a time when mass spectrometers were first being commercialized for use by researchers and scientists. Rock was instrumental in developing mathematical techniques for analyzing the results from mass spectrometers, in developing an analog computer with Clifford Berry for analysis of equations, and in sustaining an ongoing dialog between engineers and customers involved in development of both the mass spectrome...
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Sofonisba Anguissola
1535 - 1625 (90 years)
Sofonisba Anguissola , also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family. She received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art. As a young woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a keen amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting.
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Kathleen Allen
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Kathleen Saywell Allen was a British painter, muralist, designer and art teacher. Allen is known for her urban landscapes and, in particular, scenes depicting post-war rebuilding in London. Biography Allen was born in the Chiswick area of London and, due to a prolonged childhood illness, was home-schooled until she was 14 years old, when she attended Bromley Country School for Girls between 1920 and 1924. Eventually she enrolled in the Royal College of Art. Upon graduating from the RCA in 1928, Allen taught art in a number of schools in London and the Midlands before spending time painting murals in Kent and Warwickshire.
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Anna Morandi Manzolini
1714 - 1774 (60 years)
Anna Morandi Manzolini was an internationally known anatomist and anatomical wax modeler, as lecturer of anatomical design at the University of Bologna. Life Morandi was born in 1714 in Bologna, Italy. She was raised in a traditional home where marriage, children, and a domestic lifestyle were natural choices for women. Women were expected to be wives, raise their children and essentially tend to their husbands needs and wants. This wasn’t the case for Anna Morandi. She became a wife and had children, but instead of tending to her husband, she worked side by side with him. In 1736, Morandi ma...
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Paula Modersohn-Becker
1876 - 1907 (31 years)
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German Expressionist painter of the late 19th and early 20th century. She is noted for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. She is considered one of the most important representatives of early expressionism, producing more than 700 paintings and over 1000 drawings during her active painting life. She is recognized both as the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, and the first woman to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art . Additionally, she is considered to be the first woman artist to depict her...
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Matilda Ellen Bishop
1842 - 1913 (71 years)
Matilda Ellen Bishop was the first Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London and was responsible for establishing many of the early traditions at the institution. Her father was a scholarly Church of England clergyman.
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Cecilia Beaux
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.
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Suzanne Scheuer
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Suzanne Scheuer was an American fine artist, best known for her New Deal-era murals. She painted one of the murals in Coit Tower, Newsgathering. Biography Suzanne Scheuer was born in San Jose, California on February 11, 1898. Scheuer was of Dutch descent.
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Mabel May Woodward
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Mabel May Woodward was a prominent Rhode Island impressionist painter during the late 19th and early 20th century. She was active from 1896 until 1943, primarily in Rhode Island and in Maine. Early life and education Woodward was born on September 28, 1877, to a stable, affluent family in Providence, Rhode Island, where she spent most of her life, except for a brief period in San Francisco and many summers in Ogunquit, Maine. Her family gave her the "finest domestic art education then available."
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Barbara Bodichon
1827 - 1891 (64 years)
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was an English educationalist and artist, and a leading mid-19th-century feminist and women's rights activist. She published her influential Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women in 1854 and the English Woman's Journal in 1858. Bodichon co-founded Girton College, Cambridge . Her brother was the Arctic explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith.
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Salma Sultana
Salma Sultana is a veterinarian, entrepreneur, and researcher. She is the recipient of the 2020 The Norman E. Borlaug Award for field research and application. She has also been honored by World Food Prize Foundation. Sultana has received this award for her innovative model of providing veterinary outreach, treatment, and education to thousands of small-scale farmers in Bangladesh.
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Clare Leighton
1898 - 1989 (91 years)
Clare Marie Veronica Leighton, sometimes Clara Ellaline Hope Leighton or Clare Veronica Hope Leighton, was an English/American artist, writer and illustrator, best known for her wood engravings. Early life and education Clare Leighton was born in London on 12 April 1898, the daughter of Robert Leighton and Marie Connor Leighton , both authors. She was baptised with the name Clare Marie Veronica Leighton on 26 May 1898 at All Saints' Church in St John's Wood. Clare lived her early life in the shadow of her older brother, Roland – her mother's favorite; the family nickname for Clare was "the bystander".
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Barbara Morgan
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Barbara Morgan was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture. Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others. Morgan's drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s.
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Julia Grout
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Julia Grout was the Chairman of the Women's Department of Health and Physical Education at Duke University from 1924 to 1964. She was the first director of the physical education department in Duke Women's college.
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Edmonia Lewis
1844 - 1907 (63 years)
Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire" , was an American sculptor, of mixed African-American and Native American heritage. Born free in Upstate New York, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy. She was the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence. She began to gain prominence in the United States during the Civil War; at the end of the 19th century, she remained the only Black woman artist who had participated in and been recognized to any extent by the American artistic mainstream. In 2002, the scholar Molefi Ke...
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Vera Yevstafievna Popova
1867 - 1896 (29 years)
Vera Yevstafievna Popova, Vera Bogdanovskaya was a Russian chemist. She was one of the first female chemists in Russia, and the first Russian female author of a chemistry textbook. She "probably became the first woman to die in the cause of chemistry" as a result of an explosion in her laboratory.
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Elizabeth McCausland
1899 - 1965 (66 years)
Elizabeth McCausland was an American art critic, historian and writer. Early life Elizabeth McCausland was born in Wichita, Kansas, on April 16, 1899. Career A few years after graduating from Smith College , she began working for Springfield Sunday Union and The Springfield Republican, both newspapers based in Springfield, Massachusetts. She became deeply invested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case and eventually compiled a series of articles in a pamphlet called The Blue Menace.
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Christine Moore Howell
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Christine Moore Howell was a hair care product businesswoman who founded Christine Cosmetics where she formulated her own line of cosmetics and hair care products. She was the head of the New Jersey Board of Beauty Culture Control. She was the first African-American to graduate from Princeton High School.
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Jane Heap
1883 - 1964 (81 years)
Jane Heap was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner , she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. Heap herself has been called "one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century."
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Eleanor Miller
Eleanor Miller was a teacher and state legislator in California. A Republican, she was the fifth woman elected to the California legislature. She was elected in 1922, 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1932, 1934, 1936, and 1940. She founded the Eleanor Miller School of Expression. She wrote the memoir When Memory Calls about her life, including her travels to Europe and the Near East. The book includes pen drawings by Lewis D. Johnson.
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Beatrice Worsley
1921 - 1972 (51 years)
Beatrice Helen Worsley was the first female Canadian computer scientist. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge with Maurice Wilkes as adviser, the first Ph.D. granted in what would today be known as computer science. She wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto's Ferranti Mark 1, wrote numerous papers in computer science, and taught computers and engineering at Queen's University and the University of Toronto for over 20 years before her death at the age of 50.
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Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
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Vanessa Teague
Vanessa Joy Teague is an Australian cryptographer, known for her work on secret sharing, cryptographic protocols, and the security of electronic voting. She was an associate professor of computing and information systems at the University of Melbourne, until resigning in February 2020 and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science. She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Verified Voting Foundation.
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Adele Goldstine
1920 - 1964 (44 years)
Adele Goldstine was an American mathematician and computer programmer. She wrote the manual for the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Through her work programming the computer, she was also an instrumental player in converting the ENIAC from a computer that needed to be reprogrammed each time it was used to one that was able to perform a set of fifty stored instructions.
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Natalie Enright Jerger
Natalie Dana Enright Jerger is an American computer scientist known for research in computer science including computer architecture and interconnection networks. Education and career Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, she attended Kent Place School and received a BS in computer engineering from Purdue University in 2002. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Computer Architecture.
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Harriet George Barclay
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Harriet George Barclay was an American botanist, plant ecologist, nature conservationist, and artist. Biography Barclay was a professor at the University of Tulsa. She later became Chair of the Botany Department in 1953.
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Emma Montgomery McRae
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Emma Montgomery McRae was a Professor of English literature. Born Mary Emma Montgomery in Loveland, Ohio, she was the daughter of William Montgomery and Anna née Newton. Her family moved to Indiana when she was five. Emma completed her undergraduate work at Brookfield Academy, Indiana, then she taught at a school in Vevay, Indiana.
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Helen Binyon
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Helen Francesca Mary Binyon was a British artist and writer. She was also a watercolour painter, an illustrator and a puppeteer. Biography Binyon was born in Chelsea in London, her father being the poet and scholar Laurence Binyon, and was educated at St Paul's Girls' School. Helen Binyon studied at the Royal College of Art, RCA, between 1922 and 1926 where she was taught by Paul Nash and her fellow pupils included Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. After spending some time at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Binyon studied engraving at the Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1928 to 1930.
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